Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Director: Scott Murray
Director: Scott Murray
Stars: Katia Caballero, Keith Smith
Scott
Murray is one of the premier commentators on Australian cinema. He’s best known
as editor and contributor to Cinema
Papers and Senses
of Cinema, as well as for editing, authoring, and contributing to
various volumes on Australian film, including one particularly indispensable
resource for my work on Down Under Flix, Australian Film 1978–1994. In the 1980s, Murray
directed the film Beyond
Innocence, also known as Devil
in the Flesh. It was both his theatrical feature debut and swansong,
though he’d later helm a music documentary, Massenet: His Life and Music.
Beyond
Innocence,
adapted from a 1923 novel by French author Raymond Radiguet, transposes the
action of its source text to the Victorian countryside during World War II.
Marthe (Katia Caballero) is a young artist whose husband is a Prisoner of War
overseas. Paul (Keith Smith) is a high school student on the verge of
adulthood. An attraction develops between Marthe and Paul and they embark on an
affair, skirting scandal and social ostracization in the process.
Beyond
Innocence feels
quite anomalous in the Australian film canon. Many of the directors who emerged
during the previous decade’s Australian New Wave looked to European art-house
and British heritage films for cinematic touchstones, yet Beyond Innocence feels
thoroughly European in its sensibilities; where local environments and
vernacular and accents still cut through the lacy veils of Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career,
little of that is evident in Murray’s film. This is partly attributable to the
film’s French source text, but also direction and performance. Even the film’s
setting and scenery – the film was shot around Central Victoria, including
Bendigo, Castlemaine, and also Melbourne – at times look and feel more European
than Australian, suggesting immigrants and those dislocated by war have
recreated their Old Worlds in this New World.
Murray
elicits strong performances from Caballero and Smith (who, in the interest of
disclosure, I should point out is a friend). At film’s start, Paul stands at a
pivotal juncture: no longer a boy, not quite a man. The opening scene
exemplifies this: Paul’s tagging along with his parents to visit their friends
and hovers on the fringe of the adult conversation, then gets sent away to kick
a ball around with the host’s younger child. Smith nicely essays Paul’s rite of
passage into adulthood through his relationship with Martha, and Caballero is
equally good in her role, conveying a mix of strength and vulnerability.
Critic
David Stratton called Beyond
Innocence “one of the few genuinely erotic films made in the
Australia in the 80s” (The
Avocado Plantation, p. 185), and the film’s poster (see above) and
titles (both of them) sold the sauce. However, there are no Bernardo Bertolucci
or, worse, Joe Eszterhas-style excesses here; the romance between the
protagonists feels authentic, tactile, and tastefully handled. I’ve spoken
before of the pragmatism and eschewing of surplus melodrama typical of many
Australian dramas (see here and here), which critic Adrian Martin
has characterized as Australian cinema’s “chronic understatement” (see here). I get Martin’s sentiment,
but prefer to see this tendency as a virtue rather than a weakness. Beyond Innocence reflects
this approach in its execution and resolution. The subject matter, onscreen
incidents, and interpersonal conflicts in the film would likely have been
milked for melodrama in other cases, but there’s something almost matter of
fact about their treatment here. Paul and Marthe have their affair, experience
their passion, but at film’s end pragmatism parts them, life goes on, and
nobody’s irrevocably broken.
Like Resistance, reviewed earlier this year, Beyond Innocence is a
difficult film to locate. It screened at the Cannes Film Festival but its
theatrical release was delayed and fleeting, and the film is currently
unavailable on DVD, Blu-ray, or any streaming media. I bought a VHS copy of the
film a while back via Amazon – at some expense – and wasn’t even sure I’d
be getting the right film: the product details on Amazon list a very different cast and director, and the lone customer
review complained they received the wrong film (thankfully, I received the
right one). It’s a shame that Beyond
Innocence has fallen into neglect. It’s a very fine film –
exactly the sort of forgotten film Down Under Flix exists to highlight – and I
hope at some point the film is rediscovered, re-released, and enjoys a deserved
autumn.
Ben Kooyman